Plan B: Open a Country Hotel in Upstate New York

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City Dwellers, and Now Innkeepers

City Dwellers, and Now Innkeepers

CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

When Rebecca Bales, a real estate agent in Brooklyn, and her husband, Kiley Thompson, assessed their financial and vocational prospects in 2012, they realized how hard it would be to get ahead. “We were either going to double down in our careers to do more than just pay the rent on our Park Slope apartment, or do something else,” said Mr. Thompson, an art director, sommelier and record label owner.

They decided on something else: 3rd State, a guesthouse they plan to open soon in Hudson, N.Y., about 115 miles north of Times Square. To create it, they bought a 4,680-square-foot apartment building for $145,000 and converted it into four three-bedroom suites, renting for $75 to $125 a night, with hostel-style rooms starting at $55.

They are among a group of New Yorkers, many of them from Brooklyn, remaking themselves as hoteliers in a more pastoral corner of New York State. Casey Scieszka, a writer and graphic designer, and her husband, Steven Weinberg, an illustrator, are turning what was once Schwarzenegger’s Sunshine Valley House, a motel in West Kill, into the Spruceton Inn. It has 10 rooms, each 260 square feet — nine for sleeping, and one for a bar and cantina — looking onto the West Kill creek and a field of wild thyme. The Greene County property, once owned by a cousin of Arnold Schwarzenegger, includes a fire pit and grills, lawn bowling and horseshoes, swings and hammocks.

“I wanted to create a place where we would want to go,” Ms. Scieszka said.

Inez Valk-Kempthorne, a former model, and Justus Kempthorne, her husband and a carpenter, left Williamsburg to build their own house in the Delaware County hamlet of Bloomville, where many of their city friends with a similar interest in a more bucolic life had settled. Once there, said Ms. Valk-Kempthorne, “I had to come up with something for myself to have an income.”

She and Mr. Kempthorne bought an abandoned Italianate house at the center of the no-stoplight town for $50,000 and opened a cafe, with food made from local produce and meat, and three guest rooms above it, called Table on Ten. “We renovated a bedroom and dangled it out there to see if anybody might fancy staying,” Ms. Valk-Kempthorne said. “People started turning up, so we took increased demand and converted another room, then another.”

These expatriates from the city are offering accommodations that run the gamut from high-design hotels to humble guesthouses. But in most of these cases, the new hoteliers realized that they could not afford their dream within the five boroughs, and so headed north to make them come true. In Brooklyn, as Ms. Bales of 3rd State put it, “The idea of opening a business: crazy; purchasing something: crazy.”

Upstate is affordable, she said, but she added, “We realized pretty quickly that you have to make your own job.”

How profitable these ventures might be remains to be seen, and certainly there is risk involved, as anyone who has watched an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Hotel Hell” can attest. Not all the new hoteliers have quit their day jobs. Ms. Bales still works as a real estate agent in Brooklyn; Mr. Weinberg of the Spruceton Inn telecommutes. Owen Lipstein, a former owner of Spy magazine and Psychology Today, opened the nine-room Stewart House on the Hudson River in Athens, N.Y., in 2013, financing the venture in part through his other real estate investments there. He, too, lives upstate full time. Ms. Scieszka and Mr. Weinberg, who also live upstate full time, are financing much of the business, scheduled to open in June, themselves. “We just started gouging our personal savings,” she said.

But Mr. Weinberg added, “Your money stretches a lot farther up here. Friends come to you instead of meeting you in a bar.”

They bought the motel for $370,000 and have done much of the renovating on their own (except the plumbing and electric). They made furniture out of wood from an old barn on the property. “Having a rustic location allows for a rustic look, which takes the pressure off a bit,” Ms. Scieszka said.

The Kempthornes, too, saved money by using as many found materials as they could. The rooms are decorated with furnishings Mr. Kempthorne built with wood salvaged from the property. “If the Table on Ten ‘look’ seems curated, it’s not the product of us leafing through coffee-table books on the reclaimed movement,” Ms. Valk-Kempthorne said. “It’s because that’s the stuff we have around us.”

The four owners of the Graham & Co., a motel in Phoenicia, N.Y., live in Brooklyn and have full-time jobs in the design field; the motel was a vehicle to express their overlapping aesthetics and create a brand (it has its own signature scent and “Catskills vs. Hamptons” T-shirts). “It combined all of our interests: interiors, product development, experiential design and fashion,” said one owner, Jason Gnewikow, a partner in a Brooklyn graphic design firm. He called the motel’s look, with dark gray walls, furnishings of reclaimed wood in “Donald Judd-inspired shapes,” and bare Edison bulbs, “rough-luxe.”

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There is plenty of artistic overlap in these disparate accommodations, in their color palates and handmade, locally sourced furnishings. The nine rooms of Stewart House are a mixture of high and low style: refurbished leather couches (“the kind of furniture wives are happy to get rid of,” Mr. Lipstein said) and tables fashioned from wood from Mr. Lipstein’s nearby land. The spaces of 3rd State are decorated with a combination of Ikea and vintage furnishings. “We have all of our dates at Albany Salvage,” Ms. Bales said, referring to Architectural Parts Warehouse, which sells reusable items like sinks and heating grates.

The Roundhouse at Beacon Falls, a 23-room hotel in a former factory in Beacon, N.Y., has plenty of wood reclaimed from its site, too, but it feels more like a five-star hotel than a family business; its owner, Bob McAlpine, has enlisted two of his children and their spouses to move from New York City to help run it. “It was time for them to get out of Dodge,” he said.

Mr. McAlpine, who owns a construction company, had intended to retire in Beacon, but became intrigued with the curved walls of the defunct factory, which sits along the falls of the Fishkill creek. He recruited Aryeh Siegel, a local architect, to renovate; through his construction contacts, he lured the international design firm the Rockwell Group to create the Roundhouse’s look, a kind of postindustrial chic; and he hired a local designer, Elizabeth Strianese, to execute it. Local artisans built the sparkling light fixtures and zinc bar tops.

Though Mr. McAlpine had never run a hotel, he spent years building them for upscale clients, he said.

“I tried to take what mistakes other people had made or the best parts of what I’d seen and put it into this property,” Mr. McAlpine said. He hired a hotel management company to consult during the 2012 launch, but brought in his family to run the business: his son as general counsel; his daughter-in-law in sales and marketing; his daughter as general manager; and her husband as controller.

In preparation for her new venture, Ms. Scieszka went to work at Brooklyn’s Nu Hotel in 2010 to learn the business of hospitality. “For every psycho who throws a room key in your face,” she said, “there are five lovely people whom you want to please.”

The new hoteliers may bring economic benefits with them. The Graham & Co. has five full-time and 10 part-time employees, and the Roundhouse, where penthouse suites go for as much as $729 a night, employs 80 during the high season. Table on Ten, set in a part of the Catskills with little weekend New Yorker presence, employs two full-time and three part-time workers. “I hope it creates an enthusiasm about coming to this area,” Ms. Valk-Kempthorne said.

“Everybody has fond memories of when the valley was booming,” Ms. Scieszka said of her corner of the Catskills. “They want to see it thrive again.”

Added Mr. Weinberg, her husband: “In Brooklyn, people are almost constantly talking about gentrification. It’s such a breath of fresh air to not talk about it.”

This may be less true in Hudson, the latest upstate city laying claim to the title of “the new Brooklyn,” where housing prices jumped sharply in 2013. The neighborhood around 3rd State is diverse, much like Brooklyn, but without the high prices. If the rest of Hudson is Williamsburg, Mr. Thompson said, their neighborhood is Sunset Park.

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on Page MB7 of the New York edition with the headline: Plan B: Open a Country Hotel. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe